Alive so long as Death staggered
Burning in feverish and sacrificial flame,
Making our offering to the Saints and Holies,
Groaning on flower-banked altars, afire in
An armada of shimmering light:
Believer’s wax
Warming us in its worshipping glow.
An army sent to meet the agnostics,
Yet, there is no one here.
God’s legions having deserted
Before the advancing heathens,
Abandoning the high-swept ceilings
Of pale baroque frescoes and the
Tabernacle in beaten gold,
Pregnant with the muffled prayers of pilgrims
Pounded into the polished metal
Like fiery boulders, indenting
All this richness of facade
With unwashed bodies
And simple needs.
The red-hot iron of grief
Laid on lace and linen
By a race of dark-shrouded and shapeless
Women to the manner born,
Perpetually lit
By the glow of penny candles:
The permanent make-up of the pious,
The cleansing cream of the poor,
Smoothed on each morning for mass,
Slipping into wrinkles
Of disappointment and miscarriage,
Folded and bloated bodies
Kneeling
In the fagged confessionals
Each morning.
Each morning
The chronic keening of a new confession
Lived the night before
Under someone’s clammy, impudent hands.
The sun rises inventing sin:
“I don’t believe …”
Yet the blasphemer is beatified
By the thousand strokes of burning wicks
That lick carousing flesh.
Our dance of Life
Flashes contours of
Limb and shadow.
Nirvana blooms
And the Holy Ghost prances,
And the Archangel announces
An Immaculate Conception.
I yield, face to face with Krishna,
And Christ takes me from behind
And Lazarus rises moaning
And over all
The stinking sweat
Of gladioli and carnations
Sinks under foot and flank,
Roaming the walls pocked with
Niches of despair in which sit
Silver-framed photos of dead children.
Our possessed bodies
Mingle with the coying odor of sanctity
A single beam of light
Crosses us, a reminder
That ranting, raging, rowdy, perfidious
Life goes on: a wild Italian garden gone to seed,
Its perfume creeping even
Into this crypt,
Strung with crushed camellias,
Their taste in our mouths,
Their white in our eyes,
Their imprint on our souls
As we lay amongst them,
Entwined in holy Love and sacred Blasphemy.
Chronology*
by John Vick
1939
Barbara Dewayne Chase is born in Philadelphia on June 26, the only child of Vivian May Braithwaite West of Montreal and Charles Edward Chase of Philadelphia. Throughout her early life, she will live with her parents and her paternal grandparents, James and Elizabeth Margaret Saunders.
1940s
Attends Norris S. Barratt Middle School, near the family’s South Philadelphia home, but is suspended after being falsely accused of plagiarism for her poem “Autumn Leaves.” Her mother, who witnessed the writing of the poem, removes her from school and has her tutored privately.
Takes art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial.
1948
Enrolls at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, then located in downtown Philadelphia.
1952
Graduates from high school summa cum laude. Her text “Of Understanding” is read at commencement.
Begins classes that fall at Temple University’s Tyler School of Fine Arts in nearby Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, studying with Boris Blai. She is instructed in sculpture, painting, graphic design, printmaking, color theory, and restoration, and in anatomical drawing at the Temple University School of Medicine.
1954
Exhibits prints at ACA Galleries in New York.
1955
The artist’s woodcut titled Reba is purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the exhibition It’s All Yours, sponsored by the magazine Seventeen and on view at the Carnegie Hall Gallery.
Wins a place in the exhibition Best of Philadelphia Art, which tours universities and museums throughout North America and Europe.
1956
Graduates from Tyler with a bachelor of fine arts degree. Fourteen of her woodcuts are reproduced in the Temple University yearbook Templar.
1957
Wins a Mademoiselle guest-editorship award and moves to New York, taking a job with Charm magazine. On the recommendation of art director Leo Lionni, she wins a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome.
Late September, departs New York aboard the French Line ship Flandre, en route to Le Havre. Visits Paris before continuing on to Rome.
December 31, departs Italy by ship for Alexandria and a tour of Egypt.
1958
Returns to Rome from Egypt by way of Athens, Delphi, and Istanbul. Meets Ralph Ellison at the American Academy and Ezra Pound in Rome.
In April, a photograph of Chase-Riboud on the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome appears on the cover of Ebony magazine.
Creates her first bronze sculptures through the direct lost wax method, a casting technique that will become a hallmark of her creative process nearly a decade later. Her work is included that June in the first annual Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Ben Shahn purchases her sculpture Last Supper.
Works that summer at the Cinecitta film studio in Rome as an extra in a number of movies, including Ben-Hur. Returns to the United States that fall to begin a graduate program at the Yale University School of Design and Architecture.
Her bronze sculpture Bullfighter is included in the 1958 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute.
1959
Encounters architect James Stirling at Yale. He proposes and she promises to join him in London after graduation.
1960
Completes her first public commission, the Wheaton Plaza Fountain, in Wheaton, Maryland. No longer extant, this pressed-aluminum fountain deployed a vocabulary of abstract shapes repeating across a vertical screen and produced sound and light effects combined with cascading water. As the fountain was completed without Yale faculty supervision, it did not qualify as a thesis project.
With a book of engravings illustrating Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell as her thesis, she completes graduate studies at Yale, receiving a master of fine arts degree.
Finally joins Stirling in June, then in December, as their marriage plans dissolve, Chase-Riboud goes to Paris, where she is hired as art director for the New York Times International.
1961
Now living in Paris, she meets Marc Eugene Riboud, a photographer with Magnum Photo. They marry on Christmas Day at a church in a hillside village a few miles from Yale schoolmate Sheila Hicks’s ranch in Taxco el Viejo, Mexico.
This year, Chase-Riboud meets artists Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning; and writers Henry Miller, Mary McCarthy, Han Suyin, James Baldwin, James Jones, and Jean Chalon.
1962
Establishes a studio at 48 rue Blomet, a street famous in the 1920s for the Bal Negre where Josephine Baker performed.<
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1963
September 22, departs for the Soviet Union where Marc Riboud is on assignment to photograph dissident artists, poets, and writers including Yevtushenko and Akhmatova.
1964
The Ribouds purchase La Chenillere, a country home in Pontlevoy, France. Their neighbors include artist Alexander Calder, photographer William Klein, and Pierre and Nicole Salinger.
February 23, her first son, David Charles Riboud, is born.
1965
In April, travels to the People’s Republic of China with Marc Riboud, who is there taking photographs. Chase-Riboud is one of the first American women to visit since the country’s political revolution. She meets the Minister of Culture and attends a state dinner of 5,000 people with Mao.
Returns to the studio, making new sculptures that will be cast that winter by the Fonderia Bonvicini in Verona. It is around this time and during such visits to the Bonvicini foundry that she begins to experiment with sculptures made from thin sheets of folded wax, laying the groundwork for a focused, more ambitious development of the method some two years later.
1966
Receives a sculpture commission from fashion designer Pierre Cardin, creating two abstract suits of armor for his building on the Champs-Elysees.
Late April, travels to Dakar, Senegal, for the first World Festival of Negro Aits, where her sculptures Figure Volante and The Centurion are on view in the exhibition Ten Negro Artists from the United States.
In November, the exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Dessins et sculptures, couples mythologiques opens at the Galerie Cadran Solaire, Paris. Her first major gallery show, it includes surrealist sculptures made of plaster, bone, and other found objects, some cast in bronze. She also exhibits drawings from the Le Lit series, in which rumpled sheets and attenuated, faceless figures hint at metaphysical inscapes.
1967
October 21, at a major demonstration in Washington to end the Vietnam War, Marc Riboud takes his iconic photograph of a young woman with a flower standing before a line of armed soldiers. Hours later in Paris, on October 22, Chase-Riboud gives birth to her second son, Alexei Karol Riboud.
1968
Returns to making sculptures, dedicating herself wholly to the modification of large sheets of wax, which she folds, cuts, and fuses together to create abstract compositions. These waxes, later cast in bronze or aluminum, mark the beginning of an entirely new sculptural practice.
Meets Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Fangois Cachin, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, James Johnson Sweeney, and William and Noma Copley.
1969
Travels in January to London to cast sculptures at the Royal College of Art. Later that month, leaves her Paris studio on the rue Blomet for a larger one on the rue Dutot.
The exhibition 7 americains de Paris at the Galerie Air France in New York features five works by Chase-Riboud, including Malcolm X #1.
Gallery owner Bertha Schaefer visits Chase-Riboud in France and purchases a sculpture. They plan the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York the following February.
Begins waxes for three new sculptures in what will become the Malcolm X series.
In July, with her new sculptures not yet complete, Chase-Riboud travels to Algiers for the first Pan-African Cultural Festival—a summit of politics, art, dance, film, music, and theater. There she meets Angela Davis and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, and she decides to integrate fiber into the three unfinished Malcolm X works.
Returns to France at the end of July and begins designing the wool and silk elements for these sculptures, thereby decisively redefining her approach to materials and compositional strategies.
1970
The Malcolm X series is shown at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, with thirteen additional bronze and aluminum sculptures and sixteen pieces of silver jewelry. Hilton Kramer’s review of the exhibition and of a concurrent presentation of Romare Bearden’s work at Cordier & Ekstrom sparks controversy concerning aesthetics, craftsmanship, and expression in the work of African American contemporary artists.
The solo show Monuments to Malcolm Xis held at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
The Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, begins representing Chase-Riboud, and her work is included in a group show with Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Hedda Sterne, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Her work The Ultimate Ground is included in the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture. Her inclusion follows major protests by the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee, among other groups, for equal representation of male and female artists. Chase-Riboud is one of the first African American women to show at the museum.
1971
Malcolm X #3 appears in the exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum.
The Newark Museum, New Jersey, presents Malcolm X #2 in the exhibition Black Artists: Two Generations and acquires the sculpture.
Five, a documentary about contemporary African American artists, premiers at the Museum of Modern Art. It features Chase-Riboud, Charles White, Betty Blayton, Richard Hunt, and Romare Bearden. The segment on Chase-Riboud begins with installation views of her works in the December 1970 group show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and continues with scenes shot by Rene Burri in late December 1970 featuring the artist in Paris visiting the Bronzalumax Foundry and working in her studio.
Exhibits in Paris at the twenty-third annual Salon de la jeune sculpture at the Musee National d’Art Moderne, and at the twenty-fifth annual Salon des Realites Nouvellesat the Parc Floral.
Exhibits in Jewelry ‘71: An Exhibition of Contemporary Jewelry at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
1972
Solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Meets Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Friedrich Heckmanns.
Zanzibar/Gold (1972) appears on the cover of the April issue of Craft Horizons.
The Museum of Modern Art acquires two untitled drawings. One dates from 1966, the period of the Le Lit series; the other dates from 1971 and represents an invented landscape of piled stones that seep watery skeins of fiber cords.
1973
The exhibition Chase-Riboud, organized by Peter Selz, is mounted at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California. The sculpture Confessions for Myself (1972) is acquired for the museum’s collection, and the show later travels to the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Exhibits contemporary jewelry at the Leslie Rankow Gallery, New York.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquires an untitled 1972 drawing by the artist.
Creates Cape, also known as Cleopatra’s Cape, an armor-like sculpture composed of numerous bronze tiles interconnected with wire, inspired by the ancient jade burial suits of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, which were excavated in China in 1968 and later photographed by Marc Riboud. She also creates Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract, combining sculptural elements, drawings, and handwritten script.
Exhibits with Antonio Calderara at the Merian Gallery in Krefeld, Germany, which also presents Chase-Riboud’s work at Art Cologne.
Exhibits in Jewelry as Sculpture as Jewelry at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
1974
Chase-Riboud’s first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking, is edited by Toni Morrison and published by Random House to critical acclaim.
Exhibits in two group shows: FOCUS: Women’s Work—American Art in 1974 at the Museum of the Civic Center, Philadelphia, and Masterworks of the Seventies at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
In summer, visits Jacqueline Onassis on the Greek Island of Skorpios, where they discuss Chase-Riboud’s plans to write the historical novel Sally Hemings.
In fall, she has a solo exhibition at Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which later travels to the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Malcolm X #1 and Malcolm X #4 are acqui
red by private collectors in Germany.
Lectures at the Aspen Institute in Berlin and visits East Germany.
1975
Exhibits at the Betty Parsons Gallery in Feburary, then leaves for a month-long lecture and exhibition tour of Africa organized by the U.S. State Department, with venues in Tunisia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Senegal.
Exhibits in the group show 11 in New York at the Women’s Interart Center, New York.
Her drawings are exhibited at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran.
1976
Solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, and the Musee Reattu, Arles, France.
Zanzibar/Gold is acquired by the National Collections of France.
1977
Four drawings exhibited in Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany.
Exhibits in three group shows: The Object as Poet at the Renwick Gallery of the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Washington, DC, which will travel to the American Craft Museum, New York; European Drawings, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, which will travel to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Les Mains Regardent at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
1979
Working with Jacqueline Onassis, then an acquiring editor at Viking Press, Chase-Riboud publishes the historical novel Sally Hemings, which wins the Kafka Prize in Fiction by an American Woman. The book becomes an international bestseller and is translated into ten languages. It generates protest among many Jeffersonians, but the story is supported two decades later by genealogical DNA testing.
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